Superhero
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superhero "A superhero (sometimes rendered super-hero or super hero) is a type of heroic stock character, usually possessing supernatural or superhuman powers, who is dedicated to fighting the evil of his/her universe, protecting the public, and usually battling supervillains. A female superhero is sometimes called a superheroine (also rendered super-heroine or super heroine), although the word superhero is commonly used for females also. Superhero fiction is the genre of fiction that is centered on such characters, especially in American comic book and films since the 1930s." Academic Analysis Neoliberal era |Salon:/2018/Peak superhero? Not even close: How one movie genre became the guiding myth of neoliberalism> - by Keith A. Spencer, April 28, 2018 ""Big, sweeping changes in the world occur because of the superheroes and supervillains’ battles; the rest of us are window dressing, doomed to die randomly at the hands of super-evil. When the non-super populace appear in superhero movies, they’re useless. In “The Avengers: Age of Ultron,” the people of the city of Sokovia would die without the heroes’ abilities to save them; ditto the fleeing Russian peasants in “Justice League”; ditto the hapless masses in “The Avengers: Infinity War,” whom we see only for maybe 30 seconds."" "Darkest of all, superhero movies posit that humans need authority figures — that we cannot survive without policing. It is a troubling moral in an era in which a militarized police force routinely carries out sprees of racist violence on people of color. In “The Dark Knight Rises,” a version of Gotham City purged of police becomes a site of chaos and horror. I’m not sure why the Blue Lives Matter crowd didn’t rejoice more at that film’s script, as it reified Spencerian, 18th-century sociological beliefs, long since disproven. Without hyperbole, one can say that Christopher Nolan’s fairytale is totalitarian with a capital T, inasmuch as it hints that humans need authority to function at all, though there are plenty of societies, both Western communes and indigenous cultures, that attest to the untruth of that." ""Finally and most importantly, the heroes always labor to make their gear and technology themselves, or with minimal help; a normalized trope of the superhero film is that the labor force is invisible. Superman’s ice castle, Iron Man’s suit, Wakanda’s intricate mining system, Batman’s gear and vehicles -- in the real world, these things might take decades to construct, and would require the collective labor of thousands if not millions of human beings. There is an exception to the rule of labor being invisible, and that is when the villain needs labor to produce something. Villains are allowed to use coercive labor, which the viewer may see on the screen: toiling orcs or slave armies building weaponry or Thanos’ cruel treatment of Eitri. Not so for the heroes; they pull themselves up by their bootstraps, design things themselves, or with the help of assistants who are well-treated or are themselves computers (e.g., Iron Man’s Jarvis), or in other cases are made by superpowers and/or magic (e.g., the temple in “Doctor Strange”). I would argue this is by design: The fact that heroes must work alone while villains use coerced labor is a dodge that intentionally misrepresents the nature of capitalist civilization at large, which is that there are always those who toil for the rich and those who profit from their labor. Superhero movies are obscurantist: in presenting the myth of the self-made (super)man, they conceal the hard economic facts of the labor that, in reality, such supermen would require."" ""I’d like to propose an alternative way of viewing superhero movies: They are the sustaining creation myths of neoliberalism. They celebrate and rehash the underlying tenets that keep neoliberalism’s subjects from revolting. These include the idea that technology is inherently progressive; that the elite can be trusted to regulate and rule over us; that police are ultimately good; that some people are born or created superior and that we should trust in them; that there are benevolent rich people who can undemocratically rule over us, a situation that is made OK because they donate to charity sometimes; and finally, that democracy isn’t always good, because some people are inherently criminal or evil, and thus the commoners need strong leaders to control and rule over us."" Category:Fiction Category:Mythology Category:Human Culture Category:Comics Category:Manga